Expeditions with Your Dog

Traveling with your pooch is an adventure.  Whether it’s a great adventure or not depends on lots of things – where you’re going, your dog’s personality and needs, and on what you’re trying to do on the trip.

My trips are photo expeditions to isolated places.  I load the car with camping gear, food, 3 cameras, tripod, clothes, miscellaneous supplies – and my 65 pound Golden-Chow cross, Ginger. We alternate camping with cheap motels.

So here’s the Letterman list of the top 10 reasons I travel with my dog.

10. When your wife, your photographer buddies, and even your daughter can’t go and argue against the trip, all you have to say to your dog is “Let’s get in the car.” ZOOM. Tail wags, eyes light up, and you’re NEVER going to get an argument.

9. You don’t have to pack any extra cosmetics, sports outfits, or coats. You DO have to pack dog food, a dish, and a leash. Dog food does take up space, but the good news is that you can always eat it if things get tough enough.

8. Depending on your dog, you have a built-in conversation-starter. Ginger has an aura that I absolutely lack – she can raise the warmth of an atmosphere faster than Santa Claus at an orphans’ feast. 

Ginger really does evoke the coo-and-cuddle response among both men and women (more women, though). If your dog is a Chinese Crested Hairless crossed with a mastiff, you might not get the same reaction. But Ginger makes an ideal door-opener – sometimes literally.

Ginger’s ability to open doors was proved one night in Red Lodge Montana, when we arrived late, tired, and having had a hard time finding lodging. Eventually we did find a room. We found a parking space, and Ginger surged into what she figured was our room. OOPS! There was a Harley parked in front of her choice, an open screen door, and in she went.

I followed quickly, apologizing all the way. What I saw was a blonde in the bed, and a middle-aged guy with a ponytail and a 3-day beard watching the TV. Uh-oh!

That’s when the blonde pulled up the sheet, looked at Ginger, and cried out “Ooooh, what a sweetie-pie. What a good girl!” Well, there are door-openers and door-openers!

7. While conversation with your dog is apt to be limited, she won’t argue politics, won’t accuse you of hating her mother, and will always listen to you. In fact, if you’re traveling without a human companion, your dog can just plain be good company. Good reason to take it along.

6. Your dog can help you get out of trouble. Ginger is very good at following trails that aren’t marked well or are over rocky terrain. Mostly, I don’t need help, but there was a day in Maine last summer where her nose really did make getting back faster and safer. Of course, she could have been following a squirrel, but you just have to take your chances.

5. Your dog makes a great car alarm and burglar deterrent. The bad guy doesn’t know how loveable your mutt is. He just sees all those teeth and thinks twice.

4. Your dog probably hates kennels, and good ones cost more than motel rooms these days. Save the money and take your dog with you!

3. My dog makes a terrific prop, scale-gauge, and perspective-generator. Put her in the frame and there’s suddenly a sense of place, an energy, that wasn’t there without her.

2. Dogs like other dogs (mostly). This leads to some fun socializing. Your dog will make the introduction for you! I’d never have met this extremely attractive young French woman in Framingham, Mass without Ginger to enable the conversation. Ooo-la-la.

1. Maybe the best reason of all – your dog will love being with you, sharing your adventure, and maybe even carrying a spare water bottle or your sandwiches in a back pack of his own. There’s just nothing like it.


Now the negatives:

10. (With thanks to EOS John for this one, which I'd forgotten).  Dogs are furry, with rare and unmentionable exceptions.  Your dog's fur is electrostatic, which means it will grab on to almost any surface and will then cling tenaciously.  Unfortunately, one of the favorite resting places of dog fur is your camera's digital sensor, your camera's lenses, mirror, and everything else.  It gets in the camera bags, gets in your sleeping bag, and clings tighter than a climber on a rockface to any bit of upholstery or carpet.  Take your vacuum, your sensor cleaner, and your patience!

9. You have to allow for your dog in your planning and arrangements. If you’re staying in motels, you need to find ones which permit pets – or learn how to sneak yours in and out. And in. And out.

8. Your dog can tie you down and limit your freedom of movement (just as you may have to do for him). In National Parks, dogs must be leashed and kept on trails. In Denali, they must be left in campsites. If you’re a photographer like me, that can make a difference, This restriction is a nuisance, but it actually makes sense, protecting endangered species, such as the delicious Western Marmot, or the toothsome Kansas Prairie Bunny. It may also keep your dog from being munchies for larger, meaner critters with less genteel manners than your dog has. Ever seen an eagle lofting away a papillon? It happens.

7. In France, dogs are welcome in taxis and in restaurants. Not in this country (with rare and miraculous exceptions). That means when you go inside to chow down, Fang is left somewhere else. But where? Broiling in the sun? Howling his poor deserted lungs out while you’re gone? So again, we’re back to extra planning.

6. Your dog can genuinely get in trouble. If your dog gets lost a thousand miles from home and a million miles from nowhere, you’re got a real problem (hunters can now equip their dogs with GPS trackers, but that’s a pretty drastic approach). If she swallows a forbidden chicken bone, as Ginger did in Custer, South Dakota, you have to find a vet and pay the freight – or not. I now carry pet medical insurance to cover this kind of thing. Not cheap, but the vet bill in Hot Springs SD (where I finally found a vet) turned out to be $400 WITHOUT surgery.

5. Dogs have to be walked. Where we live in the country, this is a matter of opening the door and saying “Out, Dog.” But you can’t do that on the road. So if your dog is nervous, and announces at 3:00 AM that she HAS to go out, shuffle into your clothes, put on the leash, and open the door into the soaking rain. And keep hiking until Spikette finally relaxes enough to let you go back inside. NOT the best way to get a good night’s sleep. Oh, and don’t forget the plastic poop gloves.

4. Your dog can distract you from the business at hand. It’s really hard to concentrate on the photos you’ve driven all this way to take if you have to keep an eye out for your wandering pal. When Ginger had only been with me for a few months (she’s a pound rescue), I was working outdoors with a model in a steeply gullied area. The model wasn’t wearing much of anything, and the lighting conditions were difficult. So quite obviously I was NOT watching Ginger. When we finished the shot, we discovered that Ginger had vanished.

My model and her boyfriend and I hiked the gullies for a good two hours. God bless ‘em, they wouldn’t drive back to their digs in Cleveland til they knew Ginger was safe! (See, that’s the ole doggy magic thing).

She had found her way into a housing subdivision and been instantly adopted by a family with four other dogs. (Doggie magic one more time). They eventually called me, and we were reunited. But since that time I’ve always had to keep from full immersion into the photo at hand. Out comes the leash and the complaints that go with it! In her favor, Ginger has since learned not to wander while she’s with me. But still, if you’re dogwatching, your mind can’t be wholly on the job.

3. Busybodies can make your life hell. If you stop at a rest area and trot inside for a quick stop, you will come back out to find a cop staring into your car, or someone from the local SPCA is phoning your plate in for animal abuse. Doesn’t matter if windows are open, the dog’s just been watered, and the outside temp is only 70, SOMEBODY out there is convinced you’re the Simon Legree of dog owners. Just expect itl

2. Your dog’s sense of smell differs from yours. Stuff they don’t mind, or even seem to like, can cause major problems when there’s no handy dogwash and you’re in a tight space like a car. I've had to stop Ginger from eating bear scat more than once!

I mentioned that Ginger had once  eaten a chicken bone. The vet got it out by a combination of depth-charging and power-flushing her, to put it kindly. It was that or major abdominal surgery.

Two days later, when I picked her up, they’d cured her but hadn’t washed her! I couldn't stand to have her in the car.  AAAGGGGHH!  I drove around Hot Springs, SD with the windows wide open til a competing vet took pity on me (the town’s only dog groomer was gone someplace) and agreed to hose her off.

Skunks are another hazard. Likewise road-kill. Why do dogs like to roll in 3-day old deer guts? I remember fondly the night Ginger climbed into the tent with the foreleg of a deer – and crunched it all night long.

1. It’s 10:00 clock at night. It’s cold. You’ve walked the dog, who now smells like a wet blanket coated in fermented anchovies. You’re no longer hungry. It’s been raining all day, and you just don’t want to pitch that tent. You scramble into your sleeping bag in the back of the SUV. You are just falling asleep, when OMG! Your dog has just cut loose with a Black Stealth, somewhere around 9.0 Fart Richter Scale. Don’t you live traveling with Rover?